How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
Explicit mathematical hypothesis/convention examples
Example
Spatial coordinate convention. Throughout this example, the local spatial labels name the canonical function coordinates : and . The local vector is defined by when and otherwise, for . Likewise, denotes differentiation in canonical coordinate , and every spatial vector component with label , including , follows this same convention. A printed triple lists these components in the order . This finite relabelling does not permute the coordinate order, change the Euclidean gradient, divergence or curl, or change the dimension subscripts in , and (Divergence and curl of a vector field).
Assume Countable Choice (), with the exact meaning of The Axiom of Countable Choice (). Three exact boundary checks. (i) The sphere trace is the trace of the homogeneous degree-one harmonic polynomial , so the ball boundary branch of Exterior spherical multipole expansion and the ball boundary series applies to it; the simultaneous conditions in the unit ball and on are incompatible, because the divergence theorem gives . (ii) For the coefficient on and on , the function on the first side and on the second is continuous and has weak first derivatives represented by locally integrable functions, and , so weakly although is not : its first derivative jumps from to across the interface. Hence the smooth-coefficient statements of Weak and classical solvability of the elliptic boundary problems with Dirichlet, Neumann and transmission data cannot be extended to this piecewise-constant case, and the correct conclusion there is the piecewise regularity recorded by that item, not a global or -on-the-closure statement. (iii) The same coefficient configuration is a hypothesis boundary for the smooth-domain spectral completeness of Spectral completeness of the declared PEC waveguide and cavity classes: the coefficient field is discontinuous across the interface and the explicit weak solution is not classical there, so the configuration lies outside the smooth classes of that theorem, which asserts no completeness or classical boundary regularity in non-smooth classes; the weak formulation nevertheless remains valid. All three parts are exact finite computations or classical divergence-theorem evaluations, and they assert no physical interpretation.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: Countable Choice; the unit ball and unit sphere ; the functions , on ; the coefficient on and on with the function on the first side and on the second.
Laplacian. For on an open set, (The Laplacian of a function and of a vector field); in particular on .
Divergence and curl conventions. For a field , is the sum of the coordinate partial derivatives of its components (Divergence and curl of a vector field); in particular the constant field has divergence .
Polar coordinates. Under Countable Choice, the polar surface measure on is the finite Borel measure with for every Borel measurable (Polar coordinates decompose Lebesgue measure into r^{n-1} dr d sigma).
Volume of the closed three-ball. For the closed ball has Lebesgue measure (A closed three-dimensional ball of radius has volume ).
Divergence theorem on bounded domains. Under Countable Choice, for a bounded domain and , with the outward unit normal (Divergence on a bounded C1 Euclidean domain).
Weak and distributional derivatives. A locally integrable has weak derivative represented by a locally integrable when for every test function , and the distributional derivative is defined by the signed test pairing (Weak derivative of a locally integrable function, Distributional derivative).
Ball boundary branch of the multipole theorem. For , the series converges in as and its sum is the unique harmonic function on the unit ball with finite radial supremum and boundary limit ; for continuous it equals the Poisson integral and extends continuously to the closed ball (Exterior spherical multipole expansion and the ball boundary series, part (c)).
Elliptic boundary problems and their exclusions. For a bounded domain, a uniformly positive smooth coefficient and smooth data on the closure, the weak Dirichlet and compatible Neumann solutions have representatives on the closure satisfying the classical equation and boundary values; for finitely many disjoint closed smooth interfaces strictly inside the domain with piecewise smooth positive coefficient and sheet charge, the weak solution is on each closed side, with the flux jump determined by the sheet charge; edge and junction points, reentrant corners and coefficient loss of regularity are excluded (Weak and classical solvability of the elliptic boundary problems with Dirichlet, Neumann and transmission data).
Waveguide and cavity classes. The spectral completeness theorem for the smooth PEC cavity and the rectangular reflection class declares its smooth-domain class, its eigenfields and their classical boundary relations, and states explicitly that no completeness is asserted in lossy, open-ended or non-smooth classes (Spectral completeness of the declared PEC waveguide and cavity classes).
Countable Choice. states that every sequence of nonempty sets has a choice function (The Axiom of Countable Choice ()).
Verification
The sphere trace and its harmonic extension. On the outward unit normal is , so the normal derivative of is ; thus is harmonic on by [F1] and has boundary trace on . The function is continuous, hence in with coefficients , so the ball boundary branch [F7] applies: the series is the unique harmonic function on with boundary limit and continuous extension to . Since is such a harmonic function, the branch identifies the extension as ; in particular is an admissible ball-boundary datum, not an excluded class.
The total mass of the sphere measure. Apply the polar-coordinates identity [F3] with to the indicator of the closed unit ball, a Borel measurable function: ; the left side is by [F4], and on the right side for and every , so the iterated integral is ; hence . The argument uses the Countable Choice assumption of the polar identity [F3].
The piecewise-linear function and its weak derivatives. Define by for and for . Assign on the interface ; both branches tend to as through their sides, so is continuous on , and it is on each of the two open half-spaces. Its distributional first derivatives are the locally integrable — indeed bounded — functions , , : for every , integrating by parts on each half-space with the vanishing of the boundary terms (the traces and vanish on and at infinity) gives , and the partial derivatives in the other two coordinates vanish identically on each side. Hence the weak first derivatives of are represented by , so satisfies the weak-differentiability part of the definitions in [F6]; and is not on any neighbourhood of the interface, since its classical one-sided derivatives and in the direction differ at every point of .
The weak transmission equation. With on and on , the field takes the value on both sides: on the first side and on the second , with the other components zero. Hence is the constant field , whose divergence is by [F2]; equivalently, for every one has , so the distributional equation holds weakly on . Thus the weak formulation of the transmission problem is satisfied by a function that is not , and its one-sided first derivatives jump from to across the interface.
Incompatibility of the two sphere conditions. Suppose satisfied in and on , and apply the divergence theorem [F5] to on the bounded domain : by [F1] and step 1.2, a contradiction. Hence no such exists, so the conditions are incompatible; by step 1.1 the same trace is nevertheless an admissible ball-boundary datum whose harmonic extension has normal derivative , not the constant .
Scope of the elliptic conclusions. Step 2.1 produces a weak solution of for a coefficient that is positive and smooth on each open side but discontinuous across the interface , and step 1.3 shows the solution fails to be near the interface; this is a local smooth-interface witness with smooth coefficients on each closed side, and its one-sided regularity is explicit from the affine formulas. It illustrates the distinction made in [F8], but the global transmission theorem is not directly invoked: the plane is unbounded and is not a closed interface strictly inside a bounded domain as that theorem requires. Therefore a global or -on-the-closure conclusion for the piecewise-constant coefficient case is false, while the recorded one-sided piecewise regularity is the sharp conclusion; the smooth-coefficient statements of that theorem cannot be extended to this case.
Scope of the spectral completeness conclusions. The coefficient field of steps 1.3 and 2.1 is discontinuous across and its weak solution is not classical there, so the configuration is not one of the smooth classical configurations to which the smooth PEC cavity or rectangular classes of [F9] refer; that theorem declares its smooth-domain class and asserts in its statement that no completeness is asserted in non-smooth classes. The explicit weak solution of step 2.1 shows that the weak formulation of the equation remains valid in this excluded configuration and does not acquire the missing classical regularity, so it cannot be used to extend the spectral conclusions. This scalar transmission witness is not itself a vector PEC eigenfield and makes no claim that spectral completeness fails in any other correctly specified weak class; [F9] is used to inspect the stated scope, not to infer such a failure.
Audit. Step 1.1 identifies the admissible ball-boundary datum and its harmonic extension; step 1.2 computes the sphere mass from the polar formula and the closed-ball volume; step 2.2 uses the divergence theorem to show that in and on cannot hold simultaneously; steps 1.3 and 2.1 exhibit the continuous, weakly differentiable piecewise-linear solution with and show that it is not ; and steps 3.1 and 3.2 place this witness against the exact hypotheses of the elliptic and spectral results. The elliptic and spectral citations [F8]-[F9] are used solely to compare their stated hypotheses and exclusions; their Axiom-of-Choice existence conclusions are not invoked here. Countable Choice is used through the ball-boundary supplier [F7], the polar-coordinate identity [F3] of step 1.2 and the divergence theorem [F5] of step 2.2, whose own assumptions are those of the Statement; no other choice principle is used. No measurement, physical field interpretation or empirical claim is made.
Depends on
The Axiom of Countable Choice ()
Distributional derivative
Divergence and curl of a vector field
The Laplacian of a function and of a vector field
Weak derivative of a locally integrable function
A closed three-dimensional ball of radius has volume
Divergence on a bounded C1 Euclidean domain
Weak and classical solvability of the elliptic boundary problems with Dirichlet, Neumann and transmission data
Exterior spherical multipole expansion and the ball boundary series
Spectral completeness of the declared PEC waveguide and cavity classes
Polar coordinates decompose Lebesgue measure into r^{n-1} dr d sigma
Dependency tree · 2 levels
Sources
- J. K. Hunter, Notes on Partial Differential Equations (UC Davis)
- NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, §14.30 Spherical and Spheroidal Harmonics
- S. Axler, P. Bourdon, W. Ramey, Harmonic Function Theory, 2nd ed. (Springer GTM 137), author-hosted full text, Chapter 5 (harmonic polynomials, spherical harmonics and zonal harmonics) and Chapter 1 (Poisson kernel for the ball)